It Happened One Christmas: Christmas Eve Proposal / The Viscount's Christmas Kiss / Wallflower, Widow...Wife!

‘Ben.’

‘Ben! I’ll dust and then you sweep.’

She dipped the cloth in the mop water, wringing it out well. He watched her tackle the nightstand by the bed, so he did the same to the much taller bureau. He took off his uniform coat and loosened his neckcloth, then tackled the clothes press.

‘Why haven’t you let out this excellent room before?’ he asked, dusting the top of the window sill. He looked out. God be praised, there was a view of the ocean.

‘Auntie and I rattle along quite well without lodgers,’ she told him. ‘Besides, it was Grandmama’s only two years ago, when she died.’ Mandy stopped dusting and caressed the headboard. ‘What a lovely gram she was.’

She started dusting again, whistling under her breath, which Ben found utterly charming. She laughed and said, ‘It’s “Deck the Halls”. You may whistle along, too.’

To his astonishment, he did precisely that. When she sang the last verse in a pretty soprano, complete with a retard on the final la-la-la-la, he sang, too. ‘Do you know “The Boar’s Head” carol?’ he asked.

She did and he mopped through that carol, too, with an extra flourish of the mop on the last ‘Reddens laudes Domino’.

‘We have some talent,’ she said, which made him sit on the bed and laugh. ‘Move now,’ she said, her eyes still bright with fun. ‘The dusty sheets go downstairs.’

He waited in the room until she came back up with clean sheets and they made the bed together.

‘Aunt Sal thinks we’re too noisy,’ Mandy said and she squeezed the pillow into a pillow slip with delicate embroidery, nothing he had ever seen in a public house before. ‘I told her that you will come with me to choir practice tomorrow night at St Luke’s.’ She peered around the pillow, her eyes small again, which he knew meant she was ready to laugh. ‘You will, won’t you? Our choir needs another low tenor in the worst way.’ She plumped the pillow on the bed. ‘Come to think of it, most of what our choir does is in the worst way.’

‘I will be honoured to escort you to St Luke’s,’ Ben replied and meant every syllable.

She gave a little curtsy, and her eyes lingered on his neck, more visible now with the neckcloth loose. He knew she was too polite to ask. He pointed to the blue dots that started below his ear and circled around his neck.

‘The result of standing too close to gunpowder,’ he told her.

‘I hope you never do that again,’ she said. It touched him that she worried about an injury he knew was a decade old.

‘No choice, Mandy. We were boarding a French frigate. As a result, I don’t hear too well out of this ear and my blue tattoo goes down my back.’

She coloured at that bit of information, and Ben knew he should have stopped with the deaf ear.

‘I pinched my finger in the door once,’ she said. ‘I believe we have led different lives.’

‘I know we have,’ he agreed, ‘but I’m ready for Christmas on land.’

‘That we can furnish,’ she assured him, obviously happy to change the subject, which he found endearing. ‘Help me with the coverlet now.’

After the addition of towels and a pitcher and bowl, Mandy declared the room done. ‘Your duffel awaits you downstairs, Master Muir,’ she said, ‘and I had better help with dinner. We’ll eat at six of the clock.’

He followed her down the stairs, retrieved his duffel and walked back upstairs alone. He opened the door and looked around, vaguely dissatisfied. The room was empty without Mandy.

‘You sucked all the air out of the place,’ he said out loud. ‘For six shillings, I should get air.’

Chapter Two (#ulink_163ab884-d02f-530e-a9f2-83cd1b835837)

‘Mandy, you’re moping,’ Aunt Sal observed in a tiny break in the busy routine of dinner, made busier tonight because the vicar and his wife and half of St Luke’s congregation seemed to have found their way to Mandy’s Rose.

‘Am not,’ she replied, with her usual cheery cheekiness. ‘It’s this way, Aunt Sal—when have we ever had a guest as interesting as Master Muir?’

‘I can’t recall.’ Aunt Sal nudged her niece. ‘The shepherd’s pie to table four.’

Mandy delivered as directed, charmed to discover that Vicar Winslow had put two tables together to include the sailing master. Ben Muir was the centre of attention now, with parishioners demanding sea stories. She wanted to stay and listen.

Empty tray in hand, she felt a twinge of pride that the sailing master was their lodger. His uniform looked shabby, but he was tidy and his hair nicely pulled back into an old-fashioned queue. He had a straight nose and eyelashes twice as long as hers.

But this wool-gathering was not getting food in front of paying guests. Mandy scurried into the kitchen and did her duty.

By the time the last patron had set the doorbell tinkling on the way out, Mandy’s feet hurt and she wanted to sit down to her own dinner.

Aunt Sal helped her gather the dishes from the dining room. ‘This was a good night for us,’ Sal said as she stacked the dishes in the sink. ‘I wonder what could have been going on at St Luke’s to merit so many parishioners. Mandy, gather up the tablecloths.’

She did as her aunt said, ready to eat, but feeling out of sorts because the sailing master must have gone right to his room. She had gathered the linens into a bundle when the doorbell tinkled and in walked Ben Muir.

‘I was going to help you, but Vicar Winslow wanted to show me where St Luke’s is.’

‘St Luke’s would be hard to miss. It’s the biggest building in town.’

‘He expects me there tomorrow night at seven of the clock, and you, too. I said I would oblige. Now, is there anything I can do for you?’

Mandy surprised herself by thinking that he could kiss her, if he wanted, then shoved that little imp of an idea down to the cellar of her mind. ‘I’ve done my work for the night. Martha comes in tomorrow morning to wash the linens and iron them. It’s my turn to eat.’

Dismiss him, while you’re at it, she scolded herself, wondering why she cared, hoping he would ignore her rudeness.

‘Could you use some company?’ he asked. ‘The Science of Nautical Mathematics is calling, but not as loudly as I had thought it might.’

‘It would never call to me,’ she said honestly, which made him laugh.

‘Then praise God it falls to my lot and not yours. D’ye think your aunt has some dinner pudding left?’

‘More than likely. I can always use company, if you don’t mind the kitchen.’

‘Never.’ He opened the swinging door for her. ‘Mandy, my father was a fisherman in a little village about the size of Venable. All I know is kitchens.’

Now what? Mandy asked herself, as Aunt Sal set her long-awaited dinner before her. She could put on airs in front of this man and nibble a little, then push the plate away, but she was hungry. She glanced at him, and saw the deep-down humour in his eyes. He knows what I’m thinking.

‘I could be missish and eat just a tiny dab, but that will never do,’ she found herself telling him.

‘And I would think you supremely silly, which I believe you are not,’ he replied. ‘Fall to, Amanda, handsomely now,’ he ordered, in his best sailing master voice.

She ate with no more hesitation, nodding when he pushed the bread plate in her direction. Aunt Sal delivered the rest of the dinner pudding to Ben and he wielded his fork again, happy to fill up with good food that didn’t come out of kegs and barrels, as he said between mouthfuls.

When the edge was gone from her hunger, she made the decision not to stand on ceremony, even if he was a sailing master. Nothing prompted her to do so except her own interest.

‘You called me Amanda,’ she said. ‘No one else does.’

‘Mandy is fine, but I like Amanda,’ he said. He finished the pudding and eyed the bread, which she pushed back in his direction.